The CIA spies the future of journalism

Who would have thought that the Central Intelligence Agency has something to teach the news business?

A bit of serendipitous surfing landed me at Library Clips, the Australian knowledge-management blog of John Tropea, and in particular at his recent post "How do wikis and blogs fit together"—a topic which is not much different from the question of how wikis can be integrated into a news operation, a subject I've touched upon before, and which Matt Thompson is exploring at Mizzou.

John quotes a 2005 paper by D. Calvin Andrus of the CIA, "The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community" (free downloadable PDF via link). The paper proposed replacing the agency's cumbersome, hierarchical, inflexible and ineffective processing of raw data into accepted conclusions of fact with a self-organizing "complex adaptive system" consisting of:

• A repository of raw data ("like unrefined ore") gathered from the agency's network of sources.
• Blogs in which individuals can express and share opinions within the agency (which would be a big "paradigm shift," according to Andrus.
• A wikipedia in which material archived in the repository and discussed and interpreted in the blogs is organized into an authoritative agency knowledge base of agreed-upon facts, tools, techniques and policies.
• Search tools: "Part of the agility required in today's high speed security environment is to be able to quickly find information."
• Feedback tools, with which agency users can discover quick answers to questions such as what parts of the wiki are changing rapidly (an indication of new information being developed), where there are knowledge gaps, what areas of the system are getting the most attention, and so on. "As important as information sharing is to the success of the solution, it is even more important to know who is sharing what information."

It turns out the agency took Andrus's advice and has implemented much of this system in the form of its Intellipedia. (See also the Wikipedia entry on this.)

Does this suggest a way for news enterprises to organize and publish their information? Indeed. Here's the model (assuming a local or regional news organization):

• A repository of raw data stored electronically—census data, election results, municipal reports, agendas, minutes, financial data, press releases, court records, real estate sales information, traffic studies, environmental impact statements, and data from reporters, stringers, and other contributors: notes, audio, video, stills. In other words, all the detritus that usually stagnates in, under and atop desks and file cabinets in newsrooms.
• "News" (the equivalent of the CIA's internal blogs): published "stories" as well as blog posts, columns, editorials, letters to the editor, reader comments, etc., which are generated based on information in the repository, or on stories and blog posts by others.
  
• A local wikipedia constantly being built and refined from the blog-equivalents, in which local issues as well as people-in-the-news, businesses, government entities, non-profits, geographic features, buildings, streets, etc. all have pages that are collectively built and curated using the knowledge gathered into the repository and refined in the blog-equivalents.
• Search: a self-explanatory feature facilitating access to all of this material
• Feedback tools: these will help editors and journalists see how material is accessed, shared and disseminated by its users.

But importantly, I would add one more key feature that's perhaps not as important in a closed system such as the CIA, but will be critical for news enterprises interested in garnering a loyal readership without gray hair:

• Social networking: As famously uttered by a college student in a focus group and repeated throughout the journalism blogosphere, "if the news is that important, it will find me." From the linked N. Y. Times story: "In the days after Mr. Obama’s speech on race last week, for example, links to the transcript and the video were the most popular items posted on Facebook. On The New York Times’s Web site, the transcript of the speech ranked consistently higher on the most e-mailed list than the articles written about the speech." As Steve Outing has suggested in a column worth a detailed read, this suggests not only that we must redefine the news organization and the news itself, but that news organizations must connect with readers and sources through networks like Facebook and Twitter, incorporating unaffiliated news feeds like Google News and Topix, pushing content out via Flickr, YouTube and Twitter, and facilitating user-generated news feeds that may incorporate everything from wire-service feeds to micro-personal news from the reader's social network connections.
  

Social networking also suggests avenues for those (like me) who are still interested in how all this gets paid for. Publishing stuff online in order to generate "eyeballs" and then selling ads to folks interested in reaching those eyeballs is pretty much yesterday's model. (Actually, it's a previous-centuries model that may have lost its final bit of momentum on 9/11—an event "important enough to find" just about everyone long before showing up anywhere in print, and one that created new imperatives for people to reach out and connect with each other.) A community-centered news enterprise that exploits the power of social networking will tend to generate "friends" rather than "eyeballs," and friends—customers with loyalty—are what advertisers are looking for.

Nudging readers over the digital hump

On the heels of the Christian Science Monitor's announcement that it will eliminate its daily print edition come interesting announcements from two magazine publishers.

U.S. News & World Report will make its second change of frequency in less than a year: having switched from weekly to biweekly just five months ago, it will now become a monthly early next year. For the "news" part, readers will have to visit their web site (organized around "five key vertical content channels"). This is seen, correctly, as a move of desperation on the part of a magazine that once ran a strong third in the newsweeklies field. If it works, its success will stem from having moved a lot of readers from print to online.

The New Yorker, meanwhile, has a loyal, secure, probably somewhat stodgy circulation base of about 1,000,000, and although advertising is down, it can probably hang on for a good long while in print. But, rather than waiting for dire straits, the New Yorker is quietly allowing print subscribers to sign up for access to a full-facsimile digital edition, including all the ads, at no extra cost. (So quietly, there's no promotion, just a well-hidden FAQ, about this on their own site, along with a promo ad in the magazine.) And get this: this digital-edition privilege comes with unfettered access to the entire New Yorker archive going back to 1925, again in full facsimile view. I'm on board, no hesitation. This is a smart, pro-active, though no doubt experimental move in the right direction. Rather than waiting for readers to flip to the digital side, the New Yorker is giving them a nudge to see what will happen.

As Lauren Rich Fine writes this week:

If the goal is to preserve quality journalism, diversity of views, investigative reporting and the like, something radical has to happen. Eliminating distribution, production and paper costs virtually reduces the costs to what is essential, the voice. However, while traffic is up at most news sites and newspapers can claim their fair share, something is still getting lost in the translation. The amount of time spent on these sites is well below the time believed to have been spent in the print counterpart. If major brands push consumers online more heavily—i.e. it’s this or nothing—there might really be a business there. Increased time spent on a site should result in more ad impressions. If enough publications really push, maybe others will be brave enough to follow. Maybe more advertisers will take notice and join them. This could be good. It could add years to papers’ respective lives.

And, it could be that with a nudge here and a nudge there ("this or nothing" might be a tad strong for now), news organizations will find that readers are actually ready to make the move. Especially if the news organizations start thinking and acting like web-first publishers, as U.S. News and the Monitor are doing.

Luther had 96 theses; me, just six...

Correction 11/19/2008: I just figured out Luther nailed only 95 theses to the church door. (No copy editor called me on that, though.) I'm leaving the title alone, or Blogger will bork the links.
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I've been digesting bits and pieces I can find from the recent New Business Models for News conference at CUNY. (More linked at this Twitter feed.) It seems as if a new-news-business-models junkie could be permanently on the road attending this kind of affair. Tomorrow night, there's a confab at the Christian Science Monitor called "The Future of Journalism"—you can tune into the webcast; it should be interesting given their recent decision to drop the daily print edition. And next week, the Poynter Institute hosts yet another pow-wow on "Who Will Pay for the News." (Bill Densmore, who is a panelist, sent me the agenda; I can't offhand find a link to the event at the Poynter site.) So once I get through surfing all of this from my armchair, I'll have plenty of blog fodder.

Meanwhile, for those who want to quit talking to each other at conferences and just get going with a "new business model for news," here are five simple premises, or factors creating a business opportunity, that I think form the foundation for any such venture (in this case, one that's focused on local news).

Premise #1: The average age of daily newspaper readers is approaching 60 years of age; daily newspaper readership drops to near zero as one travels down the age demographics to the 20-somethings; and readership continues to decline, year after year, across all demographic groups. Before long, at this rate, the average daily newspaper reader will be a retired person, and only a minority of retired people will read a daily paper. This is not a model for a sustainable business, no matter how many readers the paper can point to as coincidentally consuming some of their news online. In other words, daily printed newspapers are dinosaurs and will very soon no longer be viable to advertisers as a mass-marketing vehicle. Those advertisers will need and want new ways to broadly reach consumers in local markets, and the right new local news ventures can do that.

Premise #2: Virtually all daily newspaper publishers continue to be print-centric. They organize their daily operations around their nightly deadlines; their reporters and salespeople carry business cards with the name of the printed newspaper, not the website's name, as the prominent logo; they pay lip service to being "online businesses" but their web sites are largely archival reflections of the print product rather than online destinations that fulfill the need for excellent local online journalism. The recent rounds of layoffs and buyouts at nearly every newspaper only compound this problem and prevent newspapers from effecting the needed transformation. This creates an opening for new local news ventures.

Premise #3: In any local news market, there is a strong appetite for local news and information that is largely unfulfilled. The huge, unflagging interest in our excrutiatingly long election process and the November 4 turnout demonstrate this at the national level; but at the local level there's an equal, though underserved, need to know what's going on. Newspapers have been cutting resources and newsholes for years, with the result that there's a shortage of good local investigative and explanatory journalism, as well as gaps at the "chicken supper" end of the spectrum. Meetings, crimes and disasters, the simplest things to cover, get most of the reporting and editing resources. The opportunity for new local news ventures is to fill those gaps.

Premise #4: Innovation can create whole new ways to present and create news content, and by being nimble, new local news ventures can do this faster, cheaper and better than their local daily newspaper competitors (as long as those are still around to compete). For example, they can and should create local wikis— see several previous posts for elaboration. They can do more with Twitter as a news tool. They can do more with blogs and with open-source journalism. They can create databases filled with useful local information, and tools with which readers can analyze them. If they do this kind of thing right, they can become indispensable to local web users in a way that even Google can not replicate, because Google does not and can not know all the ins and outs of living in any particular local community. (And I should add, all of this goes for non-geographic communities, too.)

Premise #5: Broadband penetration is curving toward 100 percent; computers still keep getting cheaper in real dollars; mobile access by cellphone, PDA and e-paper device keeps expanding. In other words, the infrastructure exists and is growing. And yet, the number of new, web-centric local news ventures is still pretty small. Perhaps this is because financing has been on the sidelines waiting for the right model to emerge, but in reality, there must and will be many models in many communities. Because the newspaper tailspin is now clear and irreversible, the opportunity to launch new local news ventures is now. Investors should get on board, or entrepreneurs should just find ways to bootstrap their ideas.

Premise #6: Print is not dead. Yes, I'm writing off daily newspapers, but weeklies and niche products are viable. As demonstrated by Richard Anderson of Village Soup and others, there's a business model that combines a robust web site with one or more weekly newspapers in a local market, as long as the business is built around the web site, not around the newspaper. A new local news venture should take a good long at Village Soup and similar operations.

The Numbers Game

As they do every six months, last week the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) reported newspaper circulation averages for the "FAS-FAX period" from April through September. The news didn't look good, with weekday numbers down 4.64 percent year-over-year, and Sunday down 4.64 percent. This represented an acceleration of the prior-year pace of decline, which was 2.6 percent weekdays and 3.5 percent Sundays.

As usual, the industry tried to put a good spin on the numbers, as summed up by Russell Adams in the Wall Street Journal:

But the reality is in some ways less bleak than the latest numbers indicate: Some newspapers have raised newsstand prices, curtailed discounted copies and halted delivery to the least profitable customers. Also, while print circulation has been declining for years as readers continue their mass migration to the Web, many publishers point out they are reaching more readers than before through print and online. The problem for publishers is the printed paper commands higher ad rates than the Web so even as more people read newspaper content, the papers pull in less money.

Some newspapers were able to point to gains in overall combined audience of online and print readers. In particular, Matt Baldwin, V.P. of Research at MediaNews Group, wrote an indignant memo claiming growth in the total audience of the Denver Post (owned by MediaNews) and Rocky Mountain News (managed by MediaNews as part of a joint operating agreement). This came after the Post as well as the Rocky had each reported their print circulation drops the other day without, apparently, getting the online audience spin from their V.P. of Research.

An obvious question about this combined audience approach might be, aren't we comparing apples and oranges? The print portion of the averages reported (in the first link in the previous paragraph) are seven-day readers. A one-day reader counts as only one-seventh of a reader in that average. But the are adding to that the seven-day "unique visitor" number, in which a one-time, one-day web site visitor counts as one full reader. Apples and apples would demand adding only the one-day unique visitor average, which is undoubtedly much lower. Moreover, as acknowledged by Baldwin, some print readers are also site visitors, and nothing has been done to eliminate the overlap.

A set of web audience metrics that looks more reliable comes from the National Newspaper Association (NAA), which reports:

Newspaper Web sites attracted more than 68.3 million unique visitors on average (41.4 percent of all Internet users) in the third quarter of 2008, a record number that reflects a 15.8 percent increase over the same period a year ago, according to a custom analysis provided by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America.

The NAA recognizes that both the election and the economy are contributing toward this rise, but their stats show pretty similar reach during July, August and September, which is not what you'd expect if the trend were due mainly to current events. In the NAA's findings, the average unique visitor made eight or nine visits, however, so this is not seven-day readership. In fact, if you examine their stats closely, the NAA is saying that 41 percent of web users spend about 45 minutes a month, or an average of only 90 seconds per day, at newspaper sites. If you look at it that way, it's not much of an audience. In fact, the top half-dozen or so domain names all individually outpull the entire newspaper industry in unique visitors.

Still, there seem to be some optimists out there. Neither the revenue slide nor the circulation decline seem to bother Richard Siklos at Fortune in recommending a bet on printed newspapers.

Andreessen speaks

Imagine newspapers have never been invented. Here's the synopsis of a business plan for your consideration:
(a) head for Canada,
(b) cut down trees,
(c) feed said trees into one end of gigantic machine,
(d) take pulp paper from other end of machine,
(e) truck said paper to place of publication,
(f) feed paper into one end of another gigantic machine, which prints words and pictures on it,
(g) load printed paper into more trucks,
(h) deliver newspapers to front porches (behind screen door!), driveways and plastic tubes on metal posts beside roads in every godforsaken nook and cranny near said place of publication.

Likelihood of angel funding? Not too high. Likelihood that enterprises actually engaged in this crazy business today figure out that continuing this routine much longer is folly? About the same, apparently.

Marc Andreessen, well-known entrepreneur of the digital world, suggests in a Portfolio interview, responding to the question, "If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?":

Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business—shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defense and into playing offense, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing.

The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you would lose 90 percent of your revenue. Then you play offense. And guess what? You’re an internet company.

Now, realistically, he would not shut the printed Times down overnight. The important point here is that newspapers are not playing offense (although the Times comes pretty close), and they're not internet companies.

To be an internet business, a digital business, the a newspaper would have to decide, irrevocably, that it will now be focused totally on publishing online content and creating online communities, 24/7. No U.S. newspaper organization, including the Times, has truly done this—they continue to be organized around that evening deadline for the print product, and everything else is secondary. And their reporters and salespeople continue to carry business cards with the prominent name and logo of the printed paper, not that of their web site.

Importantly, getting out of the daily distribution of "ink on dead trees" does not preclude sweeping some of that digital content into print from time to time. The Christian Science Monitor will stop its daily paper, but will maintain a weekly magazine. Politico publishes a weekly newspaper circulated on Capitol Hill. Wisconsin's Capital Times eliminated its daily edition, but still publishes twice-weekly niche tabloids. The Onion is driven by its web business, but has a print edition with a circulation of 690,000.

Andreessen’s solution is radical, and he probably knows it’s not going to happen, not right now. But the Times and all other daily newspapers could, and should, consider the radical-enough solution of going digital by dropping everything except a profitable, ad- and feature-laden Sunday package (and probably switching that to Saturday publication). Cutting out six mostly break-even distribution days a week would be a lot smarter than cutting out 40 percent of their news staffs. (And, as Mark Potts suggests, and I agree, "Newspapers haven't even scratched the surface on potential online advertising revenue, and that's partly because they're still focused on print.")

Now, in Living Color...

A while back I wrote several posts about e-paper (Esquire and E-paper, Kindle as a news delivery tool, the new Plastic Logic e-reader). All of these dealt with existing black-and-white screen technology.

Now, Freestyle Audio is first on the market with a device featuring a color e-paper screen manufactured by Qualcom. OK, it's pretty small, but so were the first commercial applications of black-and-white e-paper. Qualcomm's technology is reported to be able to change pixel colors rapidly enough to handle video. The right app for this is clearly an iPhone-sized screen, but if they can eventually scale this to page size, make it flexible, and build in WiFi, you'll be carrying around a piece of paper showing instant updates of your news feeds, including video. Sign me up.

Welcome to The Christian Science Blog

I just about fell off the couch when NPR's "Marketplace" mentioned this evening that the Christian Science Monitor plans to drop its print edition in April. It's not as if the New York Times or WaPo dropped that bombshell, but nevertheless, it's a turning point.

While it has a circulation of only about 50,000, the century-old Monitor, with a net loss of $18.9 million covered by subsidies from the Mother Church and an endowment fund, was able to maintain 9 foreign bureaus, 9 U.S. bureaus, and 100 news staffers. They can, perhaps, maintain all of that with a subsidy half as large by cutting out the print edition, with the exception of a printed weekly magazine. In their own words, the Monitor will be "the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day."

In my second post on this blog, on September 20, I wrote:

To have even a chance of survival, the mindset of the industry needs to become: We are in the business of publishing information content continuously on our web sites; every 24 hours (for now, and this may ultimately change to once or twice weekly) we gather some of that information into a printed product and distribute it, but our business is focused on and driven by our online operations. Right now, I don't see anyone in the industry articulating this direction unequivocally.

Scratch that last sentence. The Christian Science Monitor has seen the light. Congratulations. Who's next?

Miscellany

Sorry about the 5-day gap. Here are some random items not exactly about News after Newspapers, but certainly further indication that we may soon be in an After Newspapers world.

The "September FAS-FAX" numbers are out—that's the self-reported circulation figures of U.S. newspapers for the 6 months ending September 30, versus the same period a year ago. Guess what—they are down: 4.6% on weekdays and 4.8% on Sundays. The rationalization this time is that lots of papers are cutting out unprofitable—that is, not actually real—circulation. This includes gimmickry like Newspapers in Education, "third-party" promotions in which businesses pay for thousands of giveaway copies, "bonus days" in which papers are delivered on, say, Monday through Friday to people who only paid for Saturday-Sunday delivery, and on and on. Since all this nonsense has been going on for years, the current drop really represents years of real, core, paid circulation decline that's becoming visible all at once.

The industry claims that some of the decline represents readers switching to reading their content online, and that the overall audience is growing. But is it? ABC's list of the top 25 "tier 1" papers showing total audience growth (print plus online) is not that impressive—only 4 are in double digits, and below these 25 there must be a number in that "tier" with an overall decline. We can't tell, because the ABC has a membership firewall around the numbers.

Arthur Sulzberger admits that the New York Times might not be around forever. (And another report here.) Instead, says Pinch, "we must be where people want us to be for their information." I'm surprised this one didn't get more play, really—the publisher of the greatest newspaper in the world says, in effect, that he likes print but doesn't really care if it stays or goes. I have to say that of all American metros, the Times is really the most web-centric today, and stands a chance of making the post-print transition. Meanwhile, however, the Times reported a whopping 51 percent drop in earnings (but this beat Street estimates, somehow). At Gannett, the drop was only 32 percent.

Folks in New Jersey must still like the printed Times better than the bleeding Star Ledger, which is laying off 40 percent of its news staff. Forty percent! This is supposed to save the operation. Don't bet on it. Around the country, Paper Cuts has tallied over 12,000 newspaper layoffs and buyouts, and that's just the ones reported—lots of papers small and large leave jobs open or make small cuts without anyone writing about it.

If the audience is moving online, advertising is not following, at least not in the second quarter, when newspapers reported a 2.4 percent decline in online ad revenues. That's not much compared to the print slowdown, but it's not encouraging when newspapers have been pointing to the Web as representing their future. But in the third quarter, the newspaper web site audience grew 16 percent. One would think that ad revenues should resume their upward trend. I also read this week, and can't find the reference, that in September 41 percent of U.S. adults visited a newspaper web site, a new high. As newspapers disappear, however, we won't be talking about "newspaper web sites" anymore—just "news" sites.

Universalizing the copy desk

Turmoil in the generally placid waters of copyediting! Singleton lets drop that he might outsource their work to India! Weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth! The American Copy Editors Society (ACES) responds (on front page of site, not permalinkable):

Sending copy editing overseas is a sure way to kill a paper's credibility. Maybe not immediately, and maybe not in one dramatic gesture, but every time that desk 9,000 miles away overlooks some nuance that local readers will spot, the newspaper's credibility dies a little. Oak Lawn, Oak Cliff, Oak Park, Oak Hill? What's the diff?

....And let's not even start on the tragicomic workflow disaster an overseas desk would cause. Just think of the last time you had to deal with an overseas customer service call center.

I'm sorry, but I happen to think the world’s offended copy editors are wrong for suggesting, in effect, that those dumb folks in India don’t know English well enough, and won't know their particular backyard, resulting in a ton of stupid mistakes.

The unions’ argument against Singleton (in their formal response) is plainly weak; it boils down to: There might be “errors a local person would have caught.” What else is new? There are plenty of errors already.

But beside that, if you look at the stories in any major Indian newspaper online, you won’t find scads of grammar errors, spelling errors, or stilted language. And for the most part, at the various regionalized copy desks already within MediaNews Group today, they don’t make mistakes about street names and such that are a couple of counties away, because Google has been invented (along with the telephone), to doublecheck those things. Distant copy desks can learn the local particulars pretty quickly and would obviously build themselves a reference manual as well. The California MNG papers are already doing ad production in India, apparently with no surge in errors, and the outfit Singleton probably has in mind, Mindworks, has been at this for a while very very successfully for a number of other major publications.

A better idea than all of this, however, is wiki-based journalism, which I seem to be posting about frequently (click "wikipedia" tag below this post). As part of this, stories could go online before getting excruciatingly edited, and would then go through several cycles of re-editing and annotation, Wikipedia-style, as envisioned by Japan's Information Architects. Copy editing in this model is universalized, as it is at Wikipedia.

Of course, copy editors won’t like that either, because it means that to some extent, Jane Public becomes your copy editor. But what's wrong with that? If Jane Public is already spotting mistakes (or “missed local nuances”) all over the paper today, while there are still copy editors warming American seats, why not let her just fix those mistakes, so reporters and editors can focus on chasing down the rest of the story? In fact, if enough Jacks and Janes out there can be engaged in the process of not only copy editing but researching, reporting and improving stories and news wiki topics, news content could be enormously enriched.

Valley Advocate does wiki, sort of

I picked up a copy of the Valley Advocate (that's the Pioneer, or Connecticut River, Valley in Massachusetts) the other day (something I do maybe three times a year), and noticed the front page headline: "Who's a WIKI: Help the Valley Advocate begin gathering data for the first Valley political wiki." Holy cow, I thought, they're starting a local wiki! They even express the hope that this will eventually be "a large and growing database of information about local people and issues in the news." Issues! Large and growing! A localpedia that's more than a directory of pizza joints and brew pubs!

No such luck, however. There's a two-page spread inside, with short bios of a bunch of politicians, and an introduction to the effect that they'd like readers to "fill in the gaps." So I go online and click on a pol I happen to know, Rep. John Olver. Can I edit what they've got? No. Can I add any information of my own? No. Can I do the wiki part of wikipedia? No. Well, actually, I can add a comment.

Sorry, Valley Advocate, that's not a local wiki. You want a local wiki? Use the open source software you can get from MediaWiki, or something similar, have every reporter, stringer and editor start contributing content, and open the gates to the public to add and edit. But, you were right about "local people and issues in the news"—the right way to build a localpedia is to base it around people and current issues, not restaurants and historic landmarks. (See multiple previous posts on this.)

I'll just have to keep looking for someone to kick this off right. Or do it myself.
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Extra: Must-read of the day is "The Elite Newspaper of the Future" by Philip Meyer in AJR. He makes some excellent points about why the end-game is here and now for newspapers, and suggests they might survive in some way by focusing on the "leadership audience," a narrow subset of the broad audience they've always aimed for. Here's Meyer:

If they should peel back to some core function, newspapers would still have to worry about the Internet and its unbeatable capacity for narrowcasting. The newspapers that survive will probably do so with some kind of hybrid content: analysis, interpretation and investigative reporting in a print product that appears less than daily, combined with constant updating and reader interaction on the Web....But it won't be a worthwhile possibility unless the news-paper endgame concentrates on retaining newspapers' core of trust and responsibility. The mass audience is drifting away, and resources should be focused on the leadership audience. If existing newspapers don't do it, new competitors will enter their markets and do it for them.

Indeed, they will.